September: A Month of Moments

I'm attempting to cultivate the more creative parts of my brain and one of my attempts is to take a picture each day and share them at the end of the month. As you can see, I sometimes miss by a day but I've got 30 images from the month of September that I'm happy to share for my first attempt out of the gate. We'll see if I can get better in the months to come! So, here's where I've been in the last 30 days!


1. 9-1, 2. 9-2, 3. 9-3, 4. 9-4F, 5. 9-4D, 6. 9-4C, 7. 9-4B, 8. 9-4, 9. 9-6B, 10. 9-6, 11. 9-8, 12. 9-10B, 13. 9-10, 14. 9-11B, 15. 9-11, 16. 9-13B, 17. 9-13, 18. 9-17, 19. 9-18, 20. 9-19, 21. 9-19B, 22. 9-20, 23. 9-21, 24. 9-24B, 25. 9-24, 26. 9-25, 27. 9-27, 28. 9-28, 29. 9-29, 30. 9-30

Tuesday

I've been wondering about some things recently and trying to figure out what I'm being called towards and sent from and simply being a bit uncertain about what's next to come in my life. That's a pretty concise explanation but I'm not sure how best to put such thoughts into words. What I really wanted to share are the verses and quote that were on my little daily calendars for this date, this uneventful Tuesday in September. As I work things out in these days I found these to be a 'coincidental' reminder of God's plans and purposes. Maybe they'll encourage you today as well!

Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you'll have it forever, real and eternal.
~John 12:24-25 (The Message)

I am still confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.
~Psalm 27:13-14

Don't wait to feel thankful, just give thanks anyway. Gradually this act of will is bound to change the attitude of mind and heart.
~Margaret Evening

Technology

I used to think in terms of blog entries. Everything that I encountered was assessed as having potential for ending up on this site.

Now I'm more likely to think in terms of Facebook statuses. I find myself thinking up random, interesting, sometimes witty, sometimes weird sentences that I can type up and set as an accurate description of my thoughts and feelings of the moment.

I've refused the temptation to Twitter and am holding out hope that I won't actually give in.

Here's the problem that I see with all of this:
I think I'm becoming more shallow because I'm not really investing time in thinking through things and figuring out how pieces fit together.

This blog used to be a place where I would write a lot of devotional pieces, reflections of mysteries explored in-depth during my time with the Lord, things that I thought would challenge and encourage others because they'd done so for me. I would take bits and pieces from what I'd read or thought or heard, shorten them up, add my thoughts, and post them here. It was already shorter than my journalling but it was still thoughtful.

Then came Facebook and I stopped trying to sum up anything. I just try to be interesting and get my thoughts across in few words without being too specific (after all, the whole world doesn't need to know every little thing about what's driving me nuts at the moment). It's fine but I think that it's encouraged me to be lazy.

I like Facebook, I like blogging, I like technology. What I don't like is when I see myself accepting one sentence as a good enough self-assessment of where I am at any given point. There should be more to my thoughts than that and I need to spend the time to get them organized and reviewed and written. I need to fight the tendency to have ADD with my writing and find ways to challenge and push myself instead of tapping out a few words and moving on. It will be hard. It doesn't match my current tendency to do more with less time! Yet I don't think that people like C.S. Lewis or John Piper or Dallas Willard were afraid of taking the time to ponder. Not that I hope to compare myself to them but I think I could probably learn a thing or two (or hundreds) from the depths of their thoughts and writings.

I think I've been allowing technology to drive me towards a much more shallow perspective and I sense the need to reclaim the opportunity in each moment for pondering the depths and stop letting myself be happy in the shallows.

Mysteries remain mysterious often because we don't take the time to study them and discover their source and effects. In the end I don't want this to be said of my life and thoughts and I want to leave behind something more substantial than a bunch of Facebook statuses or some trite blog entries.

Not sure what's to come but this is some food for thought.